What’s up by Miluska Ojeda
According to the Oxford Dictionary, feedback is “Information about reactions to a product, a person’s performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement.”
The keyword is “improvement”, we can’t make any real progress if we don’t know what we want to improve. Through feedback we can see how others perceive our weakness and strengths, and sometimes we can discover new aspects we can’t see by ourselves.
One of the things that pushed me into the User Experience world were usability tests.
I did some simple usability tests for an app and I was surprised to see how different people did not see or do what I expected and this aspect fascinated me a lot!
It made me understand the importance of a user-centered design approach and how early feedback can really help my design process.
In Cocoon Projects’ Open Governance, a way to understand how our contribution in a task is perceived by others it’s the retrospective shares evaluation (part of credit accounting system, for more info check www.liquidorganisation.info), each task’s participant declares how much value (not time or effort) each person has brought in the final result for that particular activity. In this way, everyone can see how their work were perceived by the whole team and observe if they tend to overestimate or underestimate, too much, their own contribution.
People are hungry for opinions about themselves, by now my social streams are full of personal links to receive anonymous and honest feedback. Maybe it’s just a fad, but I think it’s an interesting experiment because often reactions and opinions we generate can have a weight in our path.
This article was first published in our Cocooners N° 3
